While MPLS is an excellent environment for applications that, like VoIP, are sensitive to Quality of Service (QoS), it introduces new challenges for the IT department. To achieve the quality that you expect from MPLS, you need an exceptionally high level of visibility of the network, and of the applications running on it.

Organisations that are contemplating introducing MPLS, or have recently done so, need to make sure they have this visibility. As we shall see, they can best obtain it by first profiling their applications to obtain a baseline, and then monitoring the entire infrastructure continuously at both a traffic and an application level.